“I just want to stop the world from killing itself!”
— Donald J. Trump, posted on X (then, Twitter), 11 December 2020.
“Each worldview that wrestles with an earnest and honest investigation ends with this practical demand: ‘If these things are true, direct your life toward them.’ All metaphysics ends in ethics.’ Every worldview ends up with ‘Repent! In the name of truth, reform yourself!”
— JH Bavinck, Personality and Worldview (1928).
One of GK Chesterton’s most brilliant insights concerning the modern world, one I think of often, is that modern decadence is not simply immorality but unrestrained, savage morality. “The modern world is not evil,” says Chesterton in Orthodoxy (1908); “in some ways, the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues.” He uses the Protestant Reformation as an example of what happens when a “religious scheme is shattered.” He says it’s not just that vices are unleashed; virtues are also unleashed. And while unrestrained vices can certainly cause terrible damage, virtues unleashed tend to roam even more wildly than vices do; and in the process, they bring about even worse damage. “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad,” says Chesterton; “The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”
We see one example of a virtue-gone-mad in René Girard’s observation about the widespread repaganisation of the concern for victims, which is at the heart of Christianity. The Christian concern for victims is central to its vision of justice. But the virtue of favouring victims, this single Christian virtue that should be embedded in a network of virtues, has far too often been torn from its context and set up as an absolute to be wielded as a weapon. Victimhood, also known these days as marginalisation, has even become a weird status symbol. This is the principle behind all heresies. One fragment of the truth is mistaken for the whole. This principle is first demonstrated in the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve take the one fruit they aren’t permitted to take, despite having every other fruit in that paradise at hand.
In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999), Girard writes,
“The powers and principalities want to be ‘revolutionary’ now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves.”
They take this Christian fragment and use it to turn against the whole. In Evolution and Conversion (2000), Girard says this:
“You can foresee the shape of what the Anti-Christ is going to be in the future: a super-victimary machine that will keep on sacrificing in the name of the victim.”
But I wonder if there is another virtue-gone-mad, perhaps less obvious, that supports this super-victimary machine? Is there some subtle trend in our time that fuels the fire of victimocracy and identitarianism? I started thinking about this during this past month, during which some remarkable world news events happened. As one meme I saw put it, “The nothing-ever-happens people have been having a hard time lately.”1
If I were a signs-of-the-times reader, which is the role I adopt here, I’d look for what all the different events we’ve witnessed have in common. Perhaps they reveal a deeper structure in our modern consciousness worth paying attention to. I follow Marshall McLuhan’s wisdom, echoed in Edgar Allan Poe’s story A Descent into the Maelström (1841), that it’s best to step back and observe when chaos erupts. Watch. Wait. Look for patterns. Look for what ties together the various emergent properties. Sometimes, it’s best to stop thinking entirely and simply feel what’s happening. The meaning will become apparent soon enough; it’ll be discovered precisely when you don’t strain to find it. Here’s Simone Weil’s way of saying approximately the same thing: “A method for understanding images, symbols, etc. Not to try to interpret them, but to look at them till the light dawns.” I’m not just interested in the immediately obvious order of signification. I want to grasp something of the metaphysical and ethical meaning behind what’s been going on.
Here’s what I’m seeing: chronic Stockholm syndrome. Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological phenomenon naming how hostages sometimes develop affection and sympathy towards their captors. They become allies of their oppressors. The term comes from a bank robbery that happened in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1973, during which hostages became emotionally attached to their hostage takers. I once spoke to a trauma psychologist who told me that the phenomenon is pretty common, although not inevitable, among people in hostage situations. It’s not officially a psychological diagnosis but a way of understanding the emotional response some people have toward a captor. Overwhelmingly, it’s a strategy that hostages adopt when they believe on some level that surviving depends on them emptying themselves of all previous allegiances. They usually temporarily destroy their sense of identity for the sake of the other. There’s a paradox in this. They side with themselves by siding, if only briefly, with those who aren’t on their side. Note: they side with the other against the self.
Lurking within each of us is this possibility of setting aside, if only for a short time but perhaps also more permanently, all attachments to our own identity, whether consciously or unconsciously in the name of whatever holds our lives in its grip. Given that we live in a time of identity politics, which if nothing else indicates a profound and widespread crisis of identity, this phenomenon is especially worth paying attention to. What I see is that this phenomenon echoes a spiritual principle. The principle is found in the Gospels, where Jesus declares that finding yourself is only possible once you have lost yourself. Deny yourself, take up your cross, submit yourself to God, and you’ll then you’ll be able to live your life truly abundantly.
The goal is an expansion of capacities and an awakening to higher wisdom. The goal, as the mystics would say, is union with God. At the heart of the Christian ethos grounding this principle is metanoia or repentance, which involves, among other things, waking up to reality and turning away from what is evil. As JH Bavinck notes in his book Personality and Worldview (1928), there is a general principle here, not just a particular one. Any pursuit of the truth, really, and any worldview, has a price. To believe anything truly is to submit oneself to it; it is to place oneself on the altar. It matters, then, for what or for whom we lay down our lives. To pursue what is true, what is ultimate, requires a moment of negativity, during which some things are left behind before the prize can be claimed. Self-denial, in the Christian sense, does not mean being devoid of character but quite the opposite. Saints are not NPCs but strikingly full of personality. What is abandoned, and re-abandoned if necessary, is all that is wrong with us—if we are being true to the call.
The parody of this, however, would be both a distortion and inversion of this. It would reflect the letter of the law but not its spirit. Nevertheless, even the parody would require this principle as one of its vital conditions of possibility. The parody would be the virtue of self-denial gone mad and wandering alone. Instead of humility, it would involve humiliation, which would also, paradoxically, require an obsession with self-aggrandisement. Narcissism would replace personality, and resentment would replace gratitude. The crowd or its ideological equivalent would possess the subject. Subjectivity would be annihilated. Instead of a movement towards fullness, the movement would be towards something lesser, a significantly diminished sense of personhood. You’d end up with slavery, not servanthood. The self would be emptied and replaced by some deformity, a shrunken sense of self. I think of the professional actor in Rome as an apt example—or an actor in Hollywood. The Romans saw being an actor as essentially degrading. Even today, it’ll be actors in America that’ll come out in full force to support the election campaign of any future deep-state puppet. The insecure person is the most malleable to ends he or she does not understand.
When we have a sense of the ideal and its counterfeit, we can more easily see how it may be manifest in many disparate events. In the original principle, there is kenosis, or self-emptying, which means sacrificing the false self in favour of the true self. In the counterfeit, the true self is sacrificed for the sake of the false self. Of course, any belief involves trade-offs. Something is always sacrificed. Indeed, one way to interpret any set of beliefs is as a system of what Paolo Diego Bubbio calls “intellectual sacrifice,” for we must always build understanding upon the murdered corpses of what we take as bad ideas. But we believe in a lie, we give up more than we’ve bargained for, including what we never wanted to lose.
I’m reminded here of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics. At first, this may feel like a detour, but I hope it’ll make sense soon enough why I’m bringing this into the discussion. I plan to explain our time as being in the grip of a particularly nasty case of chronic Stockholm syndrome. Well, Levinas proposes that the face-to-face encounter is the starting point for all ethics. He sees the confrontation with the face of another human being as the inciting incident of ethical action. He says ethics is first philosophy and puts ethics before metaphysics in the order of importance. This sounds wonderful until you realise its worrying implications. One of these is that ethics and coercion become difficult to separate.
Levinas offers a phenomenological description of what it means to encounter another person. In the encounter, confronted with the face of the other, I am taken aback. I notice her distinctness, her uniqueness, her not-I-ness. I am thrown beyond myself. I could say I forget myself. In the encounter, in this face-to-face encounter, I am yanked out of my illusory sense of autonomy, and cast beyond myself into transcendence. The face of the other is distinctly individual but, in a way, it opens the door to humanity as a whole. It is not just this one singular person who looks at me. “The whole of humanity looks at [me],” says Levinas. This implies that there is no entirely private relationship. If I recognise that the other is hungry, I am invited to recognise the hunger of every person. All of us hunger. Hunger here symbolises our essential dependence upon that which is not us. We all lack. We’re all needy creatures.
This way of formulating the ethical encounter sounds lovely. It rings true. And yet it is not the whole story. Levinas is also clear that to really behold the hungry face of the other means being startled by the impossibility of not giving to her. If the encounter is true, he suggests, being and acting become subservient to responding. We are responsible. If I have bread in my hand, the other, as simply there, refuses to offer me a choice but instead presents me with a demand and a command. I must give. I cannot not give. The other, in a sense, rips the bread out of my hand.
To be honest, owing to certain questionable facets of my personality, I relate alarmingly strongly to Levinas’s recognition of how demanding the presence of the other can be. He is true to a certain aspect of my own experience of the ethical. But I am also bothered by this. Levinas offers no content for his ethics. He doesn’t want to be totalising. But surely ethics involves who I am in some way and not only the irresistible abyss of otherness that imposes itself upon me? Surely I am not merely the conduit of this voracious other who has possessed me? If Levinas’s description doesn’t just refer to one kind of experience but to the exemplar experience of the face-to-face encounter, he (perhaps inadvertently) justifies the total obliteration of the self. There is no self; or, perhaps, there is only a minimal self. The minimal self is the precondition for being possessed by the other.
Even if my reading of Levinas can be contested, it reflects something pervasive in the West. Stockholm syndrome is no longer a temporary strategy for surviving a brief hostage situation; it is a chronic condition, often self-imposed, which goes entirely unquestioned. The virtue of self-denial, when ripped from its context and nourished by guilt, becomes the core condition of possibility for total political manipulation and, ultimately, suicide. The other gets to have some say; the self, none. If people are, in essence, nothing much, then they can be retooled for any purpose. All radical social constructivism relies on this theory, this heresy, of the minimal self. All ossified openness and boundarylessness require this minimal self. The self as an interface, as a friction point, and as a mediator of the real, is robbed of its immune system when it is reduced to being this minimal thing. Total infection by the other becomes inevitable. Suicide becomes unavoidable.
The implication in the current regime is not, however, that everyone has to have a minimal self; only Westerners or Western natives are pushed into adopting this position. This totalising antagonism towards the Western self is at the root of what Douglas Murray has detailed in his book The War on the West (2022) but it is also evident in so much more. Think of the so-called AI revolution as a different example. If there were any technological sign that the self is giving way to the other, it is this, where human creativity is expropriated by the digital undead. Of course, this continues the trend to grant technological progress seeming autonomy. All technological change is typically thought of as inevitable and this seems to be an extension of the virtue of self-denial gone mad. But honestly, I can’t think of a single one of the major issues in the world today, manifest in so many news stories, both recent and not, that doesn’t rest on this chronic Stockholm syndrome. From gender politics, in which certain selves try to totally embody the other, to battles over immigration, to critical race theory, to cancel culture, to abortion, euthanasia and transhuman propositions, to softer issues like how educational systems are orchestrated, or how bureaucracies minimise personal agency, and more. These things require a minimal self. This, to be clear, is not just an issue on one side of the political spectrum. The minimal self is a requirement for all ideological possession.
But this, thankfully, is not where the story ends. As I’ve said, Stockholm syndrome is, at least in a typical hostage situation, a temporary state. It does not need to remain chronic. The other, or perhaps a version of Lacan’s big Other here, does not need to hold anyone hostage forever. My conviction is that if we step back and allow ourselves to feel where we’re at, to pay attention to the shape of our lives, to the various stresses and tensions we experience, and notice not only the demands placed on us but also our capacity to respond intelligently and wisely to those demands, we stand a chance of recognising the limits of our capacity to regard ourselves as less than nothing. We can say no to the total invasion of the other. To do so is not thereby automatically to make yourself the enemy of the other. After all, it is possible to love one’s neighbour only insofar as one is actually there to do so.
So, of course, the virtue of self-denial is not wrong. It is inevitable. Every perception of truth invites at least some measure of self-abdication and self-sacrifice. Every belief naturally calls us to lay down our lives. Still, the virtue of self-denial needs other virtues if wholeness is the goal; and if sheer manipulability is to be avoided. Self-denial requires discernment and temperance, for instance, if only for starters. Well, I sense that in all of this mayhem we’ve been seeing, amid all this madness, many people are awakening to the fact that something has gone wrong in the programming of the modern mind. Many have taken up a piece of the puzzle of existence, albeit an important piece of the puzzle, and mistaken it for the total solution to the puzzle Many have one fragment of virtue, a noble and good thing, but lack virtue in total and thus allow their single virtue to go on the rampage.
Still, the secular liberal belief in the minimal self is failing and many are starting to realise this. The Cartesian “I think I am this therefore this is all I am” is proving itself to be less than insufficient. Perhaps unexpectedly, however, the answer is not to rid ourselves of the virtue of self-denial and plunge headlong into a sea of self-help books and narcissistic self-assertion. The answer is to learn to rightly interpret self-abdication for the sake of that which is not merely other to us but higher than us.
A quick recap of what’s happened in the last month: we’ve seen the attempted assassination of Trump (13 July 2024), not too long after one of the most unbelievable presidential candidate debates between Trump and the sadly demented Joe Biden(28 June), Biden’s mysterious COVID diagnosis and disappearance (17 July), and the subsequent announcement that Kamala Harris will be the democrat US presidential nominee (21 July). This announcement was backed by what was speculated to be an AI recording of Biden, and then by some actors from the (apparently fascist) Lord of the Rings movies. The crucial thing is that Biden is, at this point, decidedly not present, which fits the general theme I am talking about. Then, there was the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics (26 July), during which wokists mocked Da Vinci’s Last Supper and thus all of Christendom. Offence was meant and it was certainly taken. Soon after this, the Olympic Committee issued an apology that sounded more like gaslighting. Basically, “We’re sorry you were offended but we meant no harm.” Then, during the Olympics, two events caught the world’s attention. First, there was the boxing match between Imane Khelif and Angela Carina (1 August), which ended in under a minute. “I’ve never been hit with such a powerful punch,” Carini told reporters after the match. There are nuances to this particular event, given that Khelif is a genuine case of an intersex woman—and certainly, there are significant dangers in combat sports if different classes of individuals fight others, which is precisely why there are categories like lightweight and heavyweight even within the usual sexed categories. Anyway, the discourse soon took this event up as part of a general worry that women could be erased if men entered women’s sports simply by identifying as women, which is not unimaginable since this has happened already. Then, there was the viral video of Australian breakdancer Rachel Gunn (Raygun) (10 August), which scored zero points because it was, to put it mildly, laughably bad. Gunn is a woke studies scholar whose scholarship is worse than her dancing. Even that echoes the discussion here since it is one facet of the trend towards obliterating the Western self. Also during this month, riots broke out (8 August) in England over the murder of three young girls at a dance class in the seaside town of Southport. As I write this, the riots are still raging but have bubbled over into a profoundly tense political situation, pointing to the crisis around emigration, the obvious presence of a two-tier policing system in England, and a crisis around free speech—all of which suggested the theme I am discussing. I recognise that the Trump assassination seems, symbolically speaking, to be an outlier here. But the fact that someone with a definite sense of self would be a literal target is very telling of the general climate of total self-obliteration.